The Small Town In All Of Us

We are all small-towners. Even if we were born in a large city, or live and work in one, we have some small-townishness in us.

We all react emotionally to the sight of a quiet street in a town out in the country, whether we see it in a movie or on TV or in real life. A painting of a country lane with a little house with a white church steeple rising above it turns us into softies.

And why is it that we can`t pass an old-fashioned general store without stopping in? Even when it`s full of ``authentic`` American colonial-era goods made in Taiwan or Hong Kong.

There are still small towns around, although each year some of their smallness disappears under the relentless march of progress. With television homogenizing us to the point where an inhabitant of West Nothing, S.D., is as familiar with Times Square as a New Yorker, little towns are still little but they have lost some of the qualities that made them attractive.

They are small only geographically. They may have only a few thousand people, but there is a supermarket that sells what we all see on TV. There is a movie house showing new pictures at the same time big cities do.

Despite this, some towns hold on to their smallness. Let`s visit one through the travel agent of imagination.

It`s a quiet weekday morning. You are walking along Main Street--is it ever called anything else?--and pass the grocery store. In a few towns there is one left. The grocer--it`s a one-man operaton with schoolboy help on Saturdays--is rolling down the awning to protect the window display from the sun.

At the corner is the drugstore. It sells drugs. And drugs in this case are what people take to feel better. Here you tell Mr. X what you want or hand him your prescription and he gives you what you want along with a query about your husband or wife.

You pass the doctor`s house. It`s usually the best in town, with his office around the side. If he has a busy practice, he has an elderly lady called Mabel who answers his phone and keeps his records.

Beyond the doctor`s house is the garage where Mr. Y and Jimmy, his mechanic, know you by name. As you go by both wave and Mr. Y says ``Great morning, ain`t it, Mr. B?``

How much of that do you see today? Do any of the clerks in the stores even recognize you, let alone know your name? Does the man where you buy your gasoline say anything but ``That`s 14 bucks``?

The village cop stands on the corner, tall, neat, honest, serene. He waves and says ``Good morning, Mr. B,`` and ``How are you today, Mrs. C?`` He stops the few cars on Main to let an old lady cross. He pats the head of a little boy on his way to school.

He is what you find hard to recognize today--what used to be called, without snideness, a public servant.

Most of that is gone. A little town is merely a smaller version of Chicago. In the stores are the same clothes you can see in Pittsburgh or Boston. The cars are the same, big and expensive. The people are in a hurry. Even on Main Street you see the bright young man with a briefcase, the snappy dresser, the dungareed girl who looks like a thousand other girls who all look like a hundred girls on television.

Small-town America is fast becoming no morthe same, large or small, Philadelphia and Cornwall Corners, Detroit and East Conway. Except for size and the amount of pollution, one will be merely a scaled-down version of the other.

And that`s a pity, because something precious will have gone out of the America we knew.